Maintenance Phase — "Seed Oils" (August 26, 2025)

Hosted by Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes

Episode Overview

This episode tackles the rapidly growing panic about "seed oils" in food, the pseudoscience behind it, and why so many wellness influencers and far-right corners of the internet are obsessed with them. Aubrey and Michael use their trademark blend of sarcasm, deep research, and media criticism to trace the history behind seed oil fears, debunk the junk science fueling it, and highlight how wellness grifting morphs into broader cultural panic.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Seed Oil Panic: Origins and Viral Spread

• Seed oils as a moral panic: Aubrey and Michael note seed oils have become the latest scapegoat in nutrition grifter circles, right up there with sugar and gluten. They observe it pervading everything from TikTok to far-right media.

  "Seed oils just come up [...] Tucker Carlson has touched on, Pete Evans has talked about. It's popped up a bunch of times..." — Aubrey [02:04]

• Media & Social Media Hype: The hosts highlight headlines like “Eight toxic seed oils,” “Is vegetable oil bad for you?” and viral conspiracy-laden documentaries (“This is how Canada convinced you to eat engine lubricant!”) as representative of the underground buzz turned mainstream.

• Celebrity & Influencer Spread: Figures like RFK Jr. and Andrew Tate are referenced as bizarre but influential vectors for anti-seed oil messaging.

  "Seed oils. Omg. Seed oils. Omg. Fucking omg. Seed oils. Fuck. Fuck. Omg. Fuck. I can tell you losers have never had real enemies. You're afraid of flowers." — Andrew Tate tweet, read by Michael [06:33]

2. Seed Oils, Defined & Demonized

• What are “seed oils?”: The popular narrative lumps together oils like canola (rapeseed), soybean, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, corn, peanut, grapeseed, and rice bran oil—but “seed oil” is not actually a scientific term. In academia, they’re classed as "polyunsaturated fatty acids" or PUFAs.
• Origins: Consumption skyrocketed after the American Heart Association recommended unsaturated fats over saturated ones in 1961 (but the term “seed oils” only appears post-2015).

3. The Grift: From Academics to Social Media Diet Gurus

• Junk Science and Cherry-Picked Studies: Early claims cite fringe sources like the Weston A. Price Foundation, often referencing isolated animal studies or poorly contextualized, self-referential evidence.

  “Boom. I’m just gonna bookmark and say boom in that sentence alone. There are bigger problems than canola oil.” — Aubrey (reading Price Foundation claims) [16:04–16:44]

• Footnote abuse: Aubrey and Michael explain the dual strategy of referencing either studies that don't exist (a la Dr. Oz) or over-footnoting (Dave Asprey style) to overwhelm and confuse readers rather than offering scientific consensus.

  "You don't just have to double check the citation, you have to basically do a completely new search for like meta-analyses of canola oil's effects on rats." — Michael [17:57]

• The “Carnivore Diet” Origin: The huge 2020 spike in seed oil chatter is traced to Paul Saladino’s appearance on Joe Rogan, building his “expertise” almost entirely through self-experimentation and rapid monetization after brief personal trial.

  "He heard that interview, and he was like, people must know my story of this thing. I'm about to try this thing..." — Aubrey [30:05]

• Supplements & Monetization: Saladino immediately launches a supplement company (with Liver King as partner), showing the pipeline from personal anecdote to wellness grift.

4. Notable Cultural and Political Vectors

• Right-Wing & Crypto-adjacent Spread: Figures like Andrew Torba (founder of Gab) make seed oil skepticism about politics and “degeneracy,” claiming banning them will revive family creation and right-wing birth rates.

  "This will lead to family creation. This will lead to far more right wing voters... This single move solves it all. This one weird trick they don't want you to know about." — Andrew Torba, read by Aubrey [43:54]

• “Granola Nazis”/Trad Culture: A faux-back-to-the-land, “ancestral eating” narrative emerges—a perfect fit for those seeking to reject modernity, combine “natural” health obsessions with reactionary world views, and find scapegoats for modern ailments.

• Extremist Conspiracies: The same circles spread beliefs like “ball sunning,” sunglasses trutherism (“wearing sunglasses in the sun makes you burn” [49:31]), and anti-Bluetooth/anti-receipt ideas, illustrating the irrational cluster of beliefs around health anxieties.

5. Misinformation Techniques & Pseudoscientific Arguments

• Industrial scare tactics: Influencers like Dr. Hyman and Chris van Tulleken describe oil processing in lurid, intimidating terms (“bleaching,” “deodorizing,” “phosphoric acid”) to stoke fear, omitting the real purpose (stabilizing, making safe, removing dangerous contaminants).

  “He’s making this description of, like, processing seed oil as, like, lurid as possible...” — Michael [52:42]

• False focus on traces: Narratives about toxic chemical residues (like hexane) ignore that modern extraction and refining evaporate/burn off those residues to vanishingly trivial levels.

  “The most important phrase there is toxicologically insignificant.” — Michael [58:50]

• Vitamin E/antioxidant red herrings: Claims that refining “denudes” oil of nutrients prey on consumer ignorance, when in reality deficiencies (like Vitamin E) are almost unheard of in populations with normal diets.

6. Omega-6 vs. Omega-3 and the Real Science

• Most scientifically plausible anti-seed oil argument: It boils down to concerns about the dietary ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acids and their relationship to inflammation.

• Debunked Claims:

  • The evidence that humans historically ate Omega-6 to Omega-3 in a 1:1 ratio is almost entirely unsupported, based on circular citation and misread anthropological data.
  • The model linking Omega-6 intake to inflammation in humans simply doesn’t hold up under controlled studies.

    “This whole field is kind of asking the question: what does it mean for something to be bad for you? ... What actually happens is it increases some markers of inflammation and it reduces others.” — Michael [70:48]

• Meta-analyses show: Not only is higher linoleic acid not linked to inflammation, but sometimes higher blood levels are associated with lower cardiovascular risk.

  “In another analysis on data from nearly 70,000 people, higher blood levels of both linoleic and arachidonic acid were linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.” — Aubrey (reading meta-analysis) [74:57–75:23]

7. Why People Fall for It: Wellness Anxiety & Eating Disorders

• Aubrey notes messaging preys on the anxious and those with disordered eating, providing scientific-sounding justification for unnecessary and sometimes harmful restriction.

  "The people who pick up this messaging the most and run with it the most are people who already have real high anxiety...this gives them some scientific cover..." — Aubrey [76:21]

• The hosts remind listeners real-life health priorities are often much simpler: cook at home, get enough sleep, move around—don’t fixate on obscure nutritional purity driven by grifter panic.

  "You're cooking food at home, you're buying and making your own food. You're already ahead of the game. Don't worry about it." — Aubrey [78:06]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Michael (On right-wing influencers): “This is the founder of Gab ...these are not people that are doing like, dog whistles. These are people that are just, like, whistling, like, walking down the street whistling.” [44:39]
• Andrew Tate Tweet: “You’re afraid of flowers.” [06:33]
• Aubrey (On animal studies): “I love the idea of someone like, like reaching for the salad dressing and being like, no. It shortens the lifespan of stroke prone rats.” [18:37]
• Paul Saladino (CarnivoreMD): “I’ll never forget the day I was listening to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan’s podcast ... Suddenly, I had a paradigm shifting thought that changed the course of my life from that moment forward. What if my own autoimmune issues [...] could be triggered by the plants?” [28:29–29:12]
• Michael (On scientific ambiguity): “There’s no affirmative evidence that seed oils are bad for you. The sort of, the consensus is that it either doesn’t do anything or it’s slightly protective.” [76:11]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Seed Oil Panic Origins: 02:04–04:30
• Defining Seed Oils / Academic Context: 08:12–10:52
• Animal Experiments as “Proof”: 15:23–18:47
• Rise of Wellness Grifters (Paul Saladino, Joe Rogan): 26:47–31:26
• Raw Organ Smoothie & Supplement Grifts: 32:07–34:40
• Crypto, Far-Right and Trad Media Adoptions: 43:54–47:07
• Funniest Internet Meltdowns (Ants Avoid Seed Oils; Ball Sunning; Bitcoin Milk): 24:18, 48:23, 49:09
• Ultra-Processed Food and Oil Processing Fearmongering: 52:07–56:03
• Industrial Extraction (Hexane, etc.): 56:03–59:55
• Nutrient Content, Vitamin E Red Herring: 60:25–61:58
• Omega 6/3 Panic & Debunking: 64:11–76:11

Tone & Takeaways

The hosts blend skeptical wit and sharp research to expose the seed oil panic as yet another internet-fueled dietary scare, fueled by grifters, ideologues, and bad faith actors. Their message: Ignore the panic, trust actual scientific consensus (which finds no danger in seed oils), and don’t let wellness culture grift you out of dietary sanity.

Conclusion

Seed oils are the latest vessel for food panic and political culture wars, but science doesn’t support the hysteria. Worry about your actual health behaviors, not pseudoscientific trends stoked by people selling supplements, social media clicks, or conspiracy narratives. As Michael sums up:

“Here you are afraid of sunflowers. This is PMS-like behavior.” [78:06]